Giordano Bruno Commemoration Giordano Bruno Term Paper

This monument is intended to commemorate the brilliance and courage and integrity of Giordano Bruno. It consists of a life-size bronze figure tied to a vertical wooden stake behind him. His face is angry but focused as though he is staring into the eyes of those who murdered him for being right. Bronze flames surround him and reach almost up to his neck. At his feet is a flat stone bearing the inscription of what Bruno was said to have responded to the judges after they pronounced him guilty of heresy and sentenced him to death: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam along with the English translation "Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it."

Behind Bruno is a representation of the Milky Way galaxy depicted against a background of many similar galaxies that are smaller because they are far away. Within the Milky Way, earth and the sun are depicted in a manner that clearly shows that they are nothing but an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star of which there are billions just within a single universe.In principle, the monument is intended to commemorate Bruno's courage and his work and as a reminder that intellectual censorship must never be tolerated or allowed to stifle scientific progress.

Sources Consulted

Feynman, R.P. (1999). The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Cambridge, MA: Perseus

Publishing.

Hawking, S. (1990). A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.: New

York: Bantam

Publishing.

Hawking, S. (2007). The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe

(revised edition). Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium Press.

Sagan, C. (1996) The Demon Haunted World: Science as….....